Course Correction
by Ruchira
Summary: One-shot, episode addition to Course: Oblivion (kinda). The duplicate Voyager had been able to launch their probe with their logs, and the crew of the real Voyager reacts to what they read. P/T, complete.


**Course Correction**

_A/N: No, I'm not abandoning _Second Chances_. I just watched _Course: Oblivion _for unknown reasons, and wondered, what if the duplicate _Voyager_ had been able to launch their memory probe? So I played with that for a one-shot. Enjoy._

* * *

"Where's the ship?" Captain Kathryn Janeway stared at the viewscreen, at the cloud of metallic material in front of her.

"No sign of it," Ensign Harry Kim replied. "Wait… there's something there. Some sort of probe."

"Can we beam it aboard?" She turned to watch Harry work the controls, his head down, a look of concentration on his face.

"Got it, Captain," he said a minute later. "It's in a containment field in cargo bay one."

"Well," she said. "Let's see what we got. Harry, you and Seven go take a look. Report back as soon as you know what we're looking at." She turned to Commander Chakotay, a confused and concerned look on her face. "If this probe is something that can," she gestured on the screen, "_vaporize_ a ship, do we really want it on our ship?"

"Harry and Seven will be careful," he promised her. "I, for one, am curious about what we're going to find."

* * *

"We analyzed the data from the probe," Captain Janeway said to her assembled senior staff, nodding to the PADDs in front of them. "The ship that was destroyed was the silver blood copy of _Voyager_."

"From the demon class planet?" Ensign Tom Paris asked. Janeway raised her eyebrows at the interruption and nodded.

"Before they were destroyed, they downloaded all their ship logs into the probe. It's going to take some time to go through it all. I thought we should get started."

Even though they all knew they wouldn't even scratch the surface of the logs any time soon, none of them could resist the temptation to sneak a peak at what they would find there. Paris immediately went to the navigational logs. Nav logs were the most boring documents out there 97% of the time, but the remaining 3% usually made for some good reading.

He heard a cough next to him and looked up to see Ensign Harry Kim smirking in his direction. "What?" he asked. He glanced around to see Chakotay barely fighting laughter, Tuvok raising an eyebrow as he read, and the captain hiding a smile behind her hand. "What?" he asked again.

Harry glanced over at Paris' PADD, then said, "Maybe you should check the general ship's logs instead of the navigational logs."

Tom frowned over at him, then did as suggested.

And then his eyes widened in surprise before a smirk of his own crossed his face. He glanced across the table at B'Elanna, who was studying her PADD intently, clearly reading the engineering logs, based on her lack of reaction to the news he just read.

Their copies had gotten married?

Janeway was tempted to dismiss the meeting before her chief engineer noticed the fact that everyone was watching her out of the corners of their eyes. It had been almost a year and a half since she had had to scold Tom and B'Elanna for the way they conducted their relationship—to be fair, the whole crew was under the influence of some alien experiment—and the captain knew that she had embarrassed B'Elanna with that conversation, and B'Elanna hated being embarrassed, hated it when the crew knew her personal business.

Ironically, that was probably why the crew loved to gossip about Tom and B'Elanna's relationship so much.

The captain hadn't heard much in the ship's gossip about Tom and B'Elanna lately, which may or may not have meant much. They seemed comfortable at the moment, but had a tendency to become mercurial without any warning.

Before the captain could act, Torres seemed to realize that everyone was looking at her. "What?" she asked, echoing Tom without seeming to realize it.

"Go back a couple of weeks before the end," Tom said with a grin. She frowned at him, then thumbed at her PADD to do just that.

And looked up at him and rolled her eyes a minute later. But she was smiling, so that was a good sign.

"Do we have a celebration to plan?" Janeway couldn't help herself.

"I wouldn't reserve the mess hall just yet," B'Elanna said dryly, but she was still smiling.

"Maybe Harry should keep practicing his clarinet. Just in case," Tom said with a wide grin. B'Elanna glowered at him.

"Don't encourage them," she admonished. He raised his hands in mock surrender.

"I think that's enough for this morning," Captain Janeway interjected before things got out of hand. "We'll reconvene later to see if there's anything in these logs we can use. Dismissed."

Tom and B'Elanna were professional while on duty these days, but Janeway still noticed the little things, as she noticed now as they filed out of the conference room. The faintest brush of fingers, a glance down and to the side, a glance up and to the side, the quirking of lips.

And then Tom took his seat at the helm and B'Elanna headed for the turbolift.

* * *

It was a few minutes after 1700 when Tom Paris entered engineering. An hour into beta shift; he was sure it was his imagination, but he always thought it was calmer and quieter in engineering during beta shift. Same number of people, same tasks, just, for unknown reasons, quieter.

Well, maybe not unknown reasons.

A quick glance of the lower level didn't reveal the sight of a slight half-Klingon chief engineer, so he figured she was upstairs in her office. She liked to do the engineering logs at the end of each day. He did the nav logs once a week, but his were easy—position at the start and end of each shift, who was at the helm, anything interesting that they saw, which was usually nothing. Engineering logs, on the other hand, involved a lot more people doing a lot more things that were a lot more complicated.

"She's upstairs," Lt. Joe Carey said when he noticed Tom. Paris gave him an innocent look.

"What if I was here to see you?" he asked. "I still need a rematch at Velocity."

"Book the holodeck for it and I'm there," Carey promised. "But still, she's upstairs."

Paris grinned and headed to the lift. To his surprise, B'Elanna wasn't in her office, but leaning against a bulkhead, studying the warp core. She blinked in surprise when she noticed him. "Did I miss dinner?" she asked.

"No," he said. "It's only 1700." He moved next to her and leaned against the same bulkhead, close enough that their arms were only millimeters apart. He didn't explain why he was there, and she didn't ask, and they just stood there in companionable silence, both contemplating the swirling blues of the warp core. He liked her like this—well, he liked her in every way that she was—but like this, when she was calm and content, he liked that she had a few moments of peace.

"Do you think it'll work?" he asked. "The enhanced warp core?"

"I don't know," she said. "There's a lot of data to sift through. That ship, that core… It was all made out of the silver blood. I still don't know how much of it was real."

But she would spend hours upon hours trying to figure that out. Because that's what she did.

"How do you think he proposed?" she asked after another long period of silence. Her voice was light, and he appreciated that she wasn't taking this seriously. They were both still facing the core, but he knew her, knew every smile in her voice, every expression, every eyeroll, without having to actually see them.

"Him?" he asked, his voice just as light. "I assumed it was her. Probably in the morning, when they were both getting ready for their duty shifts and tripping over each other in those tiny quarters. She probably tripped over his boots—again—and said, 'Dammit, Paris, we practically live together already, we should just make this legal and ask the captain for larger quarters.'"

She snorted. "You'd still leave your boots in the way, no matter the size of the quarters." She was smiling, still facing the warp core. "I figured he had some big, romantic evening planned, and then Harry comes in with some extra holodeck time or something, so he does a rush job of it and then goes off and plays Captain Proton for a few hours."

Tom gave her a wounded look. "He would never," he said indignantly, and she snorted again.

"Why not?" she asked. "You do it at least once a month." She was still smiling, though, so he figured she wasn't that mad.

"Not when there's something important," he said softly. He was looking at her now, and she turned to look at him. "We've never talked about…our relationship. It's longevity. Where we're going. Well, since the first time we talked about it, when we decided we weren't going to talk about it." She frowned at that. "In the turbolift," he prompted, and a look of realization crossed her face before she rolled her eyes.

"We were being experimented on," she reminded him.

"Still."

She puffed out a laugh and kissed him on the cheek, something she rarely did when they were in public. "You're stuck with me, Paris. I've put far too much work into turning you into a good partner to just kick you to the curb. All I have left is to figure out how to fix the issues with the shoes and the pizza crusts." She smiled at him, then rolled her eyes. "I do not like any of the other women on this ship nearly well enough to have done the hard part of making you a good boyfriend."

"Aww, you think I'm a good boyfriend," he teased.

"You'd be better if you stopped leaving your shoes in the middle of the quarters," she teased back.

"I love you," he said a minute later. "I know I don't say that enough, but I don't ever want you to doubt it."

"I don't," she assured him softly.

He briefly debating proposing right then and there, but knew she would roll her eyes and tell him he was just reacting to what they had read in the other _Voyager_'s logs, even though the truth was, he had thought about it frequently in the last year. Thought about it a lot when he was stuck on that damned planet in the gravity well as he told Noss of B'Elanna and their stories and everything he loved about her. He had told himself then that if he ever saw her again, he would tell her he never wanted to go another day without seeing her, would ask her to marry him, would get down on his knees and beg if he had to. But then they were beamed back to _Voyager_ and immediately went to sickbay. B'Elanna had come down a few minutes later, she gave him a kiss, told him she loved him and was glad to have him back, and then went and checked out the Doctor's program. She confiscated his mobile emitter until she could check it out further but otherwise gave him a clean bill of health, and then gave Tom another kiss and told him she'd see him that night after she got off shift, and she was gone, not giving him a chance to get a word in edgewise the whole time she was there. By the time they saw each other for dinner in his quarters that night, he had told himself that she would roll her eyes and think his proposal was just a reaction to being stuck in a gravity well for two months.

He had chickened out.

"We're comfortable," he finally said. "And when we get comfortable, I get complacent."

"Not just you," she said. "We both get complacent. You spend more time on the holodeck with Harry, I spend more time in engineering, we never see each other and when we do—"

"We get annoyed with each other and start fighting again," he finished for her.

Every relationship had their patterns. He wondered why theirs was so destructive.

"So what do you think?" he asked after a few moments of silent contemplation of the warp core. "Do we go for larger quarters?"

"Someday," she replied. "Not yet."

"When?"

She thought about that. "When we get comfortable and complacent again and one of us gives the other an ultimatum, probably." Another pattern of their relationship: only moving forward when there was no way to go back. She gets some violently Klingon version of the Vulcan _pon-farr_, he admits his feelings for her. They're about to die in space, she confesses her love for him. He gets locked in the brig for a month, they all but move in together. "Let's be comfortable where we are for a little bit longer. Even if we get complacent."

He nodded. He _was_ comfortable, and not in any sort of rush to get anywhere. It was nice to confirm that they both agreed on where they stood, and he figured they'd both know when it was time for the next step. And the one after that, probably, the one where they talk about how horribly screwed up any kids of theirs would end up being. "Dinner?" he asked, straightening from where he had been leaning.

"Harry's out of rations," she reminded him, also moving toward the lift to take them down to the main floor of engineering. "We told him we'd join him in the mess hall."

"He's lucky to have such good friends."

"I know, right?"

Her fingers grazed his as they walked out of engineering, a brush so light he wouldn't have believed was real if he hadn't known every touch of her skin. He glanced down and smiled at her, just as she glanced up at him.

They hadn't made any sort of legal commitment—yet?—they didn't have an enhanced warp drive—yet?—but they had something the other _Voyager_ didn't have.

They were real.


End file.
